


Mirrored

by lightningwaltz



Category: Hakuouki
Genre: Angst, Emotional Sex, F/M, First Time, Hopeful Ending, Hurt/Comfort, Romance, slight body worship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-13
Updated: 2015-02-13
Packaged: 2018-03-12 04:35:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,200
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3343844
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lightningwaltz/pseuds/lightningwaltz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Maybe drinking blood keeps him alive, but this is what makes him want to live.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mirrored

**Author's Note:**

  * For [eafiu](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=eafiu).



> A (much delayed) birthday present for my amazing friend (and bird in human form), Zeynep. 
> 
> The fic takes place immediately after their first kiss in canon. If they did have their first time then, this is my take on how it might go.

Heisuke has thought about what it might be like to kiss Chizuru. Those fantasies tended to occur when they’d been outside, holding hands, capturing the cool night air between their palms. He’d often end up counting the stars because looking into her eyes was like being in the sunlight for too long. Sometimes he’d worry his palms were too sweaty or his fingers were too cold, but then she’d hold on even harder. The pressure would squeeze conversation from him, and he’d start chattering about the constellations he was seeing. Or they’d make some up together; conjuring form out of a chaos of distant bright spots. They’d be standing so close he could hear the way she swallowed during a painful, unspoken thought. Whenever he made her giggle, he’d picture looking at her, bending down, and finally having his lips press against hers.

Now it’s happening, and the softness of her lips, and the pressure of her tongue upstage the pale flavors of his imagination. The kiss is slow but thorough, flowing through Heisuke, leaving him winded. He’s sure he’s still shaking, even though he’s holding her tight. Her hand slips up the nape of his neck, until her fingers weave their way into his hair, and thinks that she must taste the coppery bite of her own blood on his tongue. This house has the faint odor of dust and abandonment, and he buries his face into her neck until he can only smell life. Which is how it’s been for a while. Whenever he scratches away at some hopeless surface, she’s his foundation beneath it all

“What are you doing?” She has to cough a little to get that out, and he smiles. Then he demonstrates, kissing her here and there. One ticklish area makes her laugh in ticklish delirium, but another makes her shiver, and whisper that he should keep doing that. So of course he does, until she curves forward. Opening up into him, settling into his lap.

One of her hands drifts away from his shoulders, down over his chest. She starts twisting one of the buttons between her fingers at first. She slips it free, and then she pauses long enough that he realizes that it was deliberate. She untangles another and another, down and down, in the same way she’s untangling him.

“Now it’s my turn.”

She licks across the depression between his collarbones. He watches as her pink-red tongue lick his skin, and leans in her arm when it wraps around his back. When his hips jerk towards her, she gasps in surprise, and then grabs a handful of the back of his shirt.

“Sorry.”

“ _Don’t be_.”

Her hand starts tugging his shirt up, the other hand gliding over his skin. It’s been a long time since anyone’s touched him. Sure, he’s been restrained, and shoved, and stabbed in recent memory. But he can’t remember the last time he’s been held like he matters. It had annoyed the shit out of him when he was younger, but he misses Sano patting him on the head. He even misses Shinpachi knocking him over and stealing his food...

He’s in danger of plummeting into self-deceiving melancholy, so he reminds himself that he hasn’t been completely without physical contact. Again; he’s spent hours with this woman, and that’s no small consolation. Her touch and conversation has been as restorative as if those same hands had hauled him out from a frozen-over lake.

“Chizuru.” Her name always sounds so beautiful when it’s whispered like this.

Her mouth falls open on the first syllable of his name, but he’s kissing her by the second. He’s holding onto her head, and his teeth graze against her lower lip. Chizuru moans, rough and attenuated, a sound far more raw than he’d ever hoped to hear from her. His bones flame up and melt, like molten steel before the transformation into weapons or armor. She leans into him, she leans over him, and he realizes they’re lying on the floor. Chizuru settles herself across the front of his body. Her hand is trapped underneath him, and their momentum has caused his shirt to ride up even further. She’s seen him shirtless countless times, but there’s a glow to the way she’s staring at these few inches of bared flesh. He had a similar experience that day she wore women’s clothing. He’d seen her wrists (and forearms and shoulders) so many times while she did laundry. And yet, when she was in that kimono, the sleeves would slide back ever so slightly and it was like witnessing her anew. He’d find himself staring at her hand, wishing he could touch them as intimately as the lamp light on her wrists.

She crosses her arms over his chest, then rests her chin on top of them. She’s talking about something, and he’s watching her lips move, their meaning registering a second or two too late.

“Heisuke?”

“Huh?” There’s cotton in his ears, or something. “Oh, sorry.” He can’t quite settle where to put his hands. Her shoulders? Her head?

“You don’t have to apologize. I’m just happy.” She blushes, reminding him that she’s new to all this, that’s she’s just as human (in a matter of speaking) as he is (also in a matter of speaking). “If you’re doing something that bothers me, I’d let you know, okay?”

This is true. He knows it’s true. It’s just that it’s one thing to know something, and another to believe it. “Okay.”

He strokes his fingers through her hair, until its tie stops his journey. He undoes it, careful not to catch it on any tangles. It all slips down, mostly falling over one shoulder. Her hair has always been so beautiful, and she’s always been cautious about keeping it tied back. It occurs to him that she’s seen him half-dressed far more than he’s seen her with a strand out place.

Heisuke runs his hands through her tresses. She lets more of it cascade down, trailing across his shoulder and arm, and she sighs like there are nerves clustered throughout each follicle. He remembers he’s still wearing gloves, and only two of his fingers are free to truly touch and feel. He starts to glare at them, but Chizuru edges a glove off one of hands. Then she frees the other, his sword hand. The hand used to kill. And also the hand that has failed him and her more often than he’d like. She turns her face into it, kissing his palm, kissing across the life line, then sliding up to his calloused fingers. He decides he was wrong, there is nothing blocking his ears. He’s never heard better. His every pore seems to hear his steady gasping and the sound of her tongue on his skin. Even his toes must hear what’s happening. It stings and stings, no matter how much he blinks.

Chizuru notices, of course. “Oh no! I’m-”

“Sorry?” He offers, grinning through the ache in his heart. “If I shouldn’t be sorry, neither should you.”

Chizuru has a tendency to roll her eyes halfway. Like she forgets to be annoyed part way through the action. Then she smiles and, wow, she’s more than a replacement for the sun.

There are just a few buttons to go, and she undoes them all. She parts the cloth, and he resents how he can still feel it on his shoulders. He sits up to toss the shirt and vest against some distant wall, and tries to maneuver so Chizuru doesn’t see or feel how hard he is (at least not right away.) He doesn’t think he’s successful, and it doesn’t help matters when Chizuru begins undoing her own clothes. Her hands tremor, but she’s sucking on the insides of her cheek as she often does when’s determined to do something.

He brushes her jawline with his thumbs. These kinds of bones tend to be fragile, but she’s capable of thrusting that chin forward, making equally stubborn people heed her advice.

“Do you want help?”

“Yes.”

He keeps his own hands stable. Knowledgeable but not possessive. She’s stiff with nerves, but her voice is thick when she gives him instructions. With each movement he bares a little more of her. With each bit of skin revealed, she seems to shake a little less. When he has her bare to the waist, he hugs her close. He doesn’t need to look right away. The relief comes in having bare skin against bare skin, like that first gulp of air after holding your breath.

They settle down onto the floor and he runs his hands up and down her back, noting the way this plane of skin has its own subtle contour. Then he rolls her over in a flood of laughter, lying on top of her, their bodies sliding and clinging together. When Chizuru returns to kissing his neck, he slips his hand between their bodies and he ventures a caress to the side of one of her breasts. Then he moves on in, stroking and tugging in what are clearly the right spots. She nods at first, which amuses him, and then her whimpers hit an apex of satisfied sighs.

His eyes are open, locked onto her face at first. On the other side of the room, the glowing moon pierces through the spaces in a screened off window. Thick puffs of dust float and collide in that shaft of light and it’s probably a result of all the commotion that the two of them are causing. No one’s been here in weeks, he can tell, and the dust is almost sluggish and perturbed in its movements. What happened to the owners of this house, anyway? They’re long gone, clearly, and he hopes it’s because they chose to flee town.

This unwelcome thought knocks into others, leaving mental bruises. He notices how his feet are cold, the floor is rough and the mats are leaving marks on Chizuru’s skin. She’s a demon, and they fade within moments. But the fact that it’s happening at all must mean she’s not comfortable. If he hunts around, he can probably find blankets or pillows, but that might be a little too strange. Heisuke withdraws his hands and face, getting the full impact of her hooded eyes, wet lips, and the bangs sticking to the sweat on her temples. He pulls back even more.

“Heisuke?” She reaches out for him, and the motion is far too reminiscent of the first man he ever killed.

“Is this right?” Now he can’t look at her. He keeps watching that damn dust, instead. It’s probably going to get in his eyes and she’ll worry even more.

“Is this ‘right’…?” She reaches up for him, hands firm against his shoulders. Though it’s selfish, he still hopes she never pulls away. “You thought we were going to have sex, didn’t you?”

“Whoa!” His mind replays that exact sentence, marveling at how it had come from Chizuru’s mouth. She’s not naïve; he’s heard her giggle at dirty jokes, and sometimes he’s caught her staring at his lips when he’s licked them. Or he’ll turn around fast enough to discover that she’s been staring at his back. But it’s like his hundreds of imagined kisses. It’s one thing to dwell in a fantasy, another to be confronted with that fantasy made flesh. “Were we going to have sex? I mean, I… I-”

They had certainly been rushing into something. Maybe that’s just what happens after years of looking, innocent but lingering touches, and deep set wanting. Of course all of this would flare up in one great burst, like the time he’d been quite young and set fire to most of his mother’s joss sticks. That had left a potent trail of dust in its wake, too.

“I really would like to,” she fidgets a little under him, “but we can keep kissing, or we can just sleep, or talk or… anything. I mean it. I’m happy whenever I’m with you.”

“But you want to-” he swallows- “have sex with me. Right here, tonight.”

“Yes. But do you?”

His skin chafes at all the places where he’s still wearing clothes, and he aches to have her against every inch of him. He wants to seek comfort deep in her body, deep in her soul. These are deceptively simple needs, and he can’t trust that they won’t pull her down into the undertow with him.

“I think you deserve more than…” A cold house, a cold floor. Just a few furtive hours of undivided attention for her (probable) first time. “You deserve better than this.”

She blinks rapidly, and then turns her head away. It’s not the first time he’s wondered if it can be hard for her to look at him, too.

“I mean it when I say I’m happy whenever I’m with you. You’re one of my closest friends before you’re anything else. I know I’m new at all this, but I also know I want you, Heisuke.” She squeezes his hand. “So please, please…” Her voice starts to shake, and she has to wait a few seconds before continuing. “Be kind to yourself. Whatever that means for you.”

The words ‘want,’ and ‘kind,’ and ‘friend’ settles over his skin. ‘Want,’ especially, leaves punctures of heat all and light over his body. Like the stars they’d named together. All this makes its way out of his throat, not in words, but in something that might be a sob. One loud sound, and then silence.

He collapses from the force of it, laying his head between her breasts. And for some time they lie there. It could almost be mistaken for the serenity that accompanies sexual release. But their muscles are strained and rigid, and they both gasp a little. He’s still hard, and she’s still tense against him. But when she strokes the back of his head, her touch leaves ripples of peace and stability in its wake.

There are things he could say, should say. Things he might be able to write down in the future. Someday he’ll grapple with the inadequacy of words, and he’ll come out triumphant. For now he kisses her. Kisses her forehead, lips, chin, shoulder and collarbone. There’s so much more to her than blood, and he can offer so much more than pain. He licks down and down, his tongue drawing the shape of the flowers that should have been on her wedding kimono. He rolls one of her stiff nipples between his lips, his fingers working the other, and both of her legs clench tight against him.

“Stay here.” Her voice shatters a bit at the end. “Don’t go anywhere, Heisuke.”

Heisuke obeys her and disobeys her all at once. He tries to make a joke about how they wouldn’t get very far if he didn’t move at all. But his words get strangled up in his mouth, and he has to keep going. He kisses her stomach, and it trembles against his mouth. He undoes her sash, and inches her hakama down just enough to lick the bend of her hips, stopping to kiss a few birthmarks that he’s seeing for the very first time. She’s moving her legs, trying to get her pants to slide off, but he’s very much in the way. So he tugs the remainder of her clothes down, inch by inch. He closes his eyes, and sucks on the inside of her thighs. There’s a tremor deep with her legs, and he knows the dampness on her skin is his doing. Down and down he goes, lifting her leg a bit to attend to the inside of her knee. He bites a little and she’s still groaning when he’s moved on to her shin. He stops around her ankle, a little shocked at the sight of her splayed open, hand over her mouth, wanting him, wanting them, wanting this.

When he returns to her face, she kisses him and grabs onto his shoulders like she’s clinging to the edge of a cliff. He would never leave her stranded.

His hand moves down, this time, settling below her navel. He presses his lips to her ear, sucking it between his teeth. And finally the words spill out in a shuddery whisper. “I want you, too.”

She grabs his hand, pushing it between her legs. “I’m so glad, Heisuke.”

She’s so warm, and so wet it’s hard to get a handle on her at first. He’s too distracted, too amazed. But he also wants to see her come so badly, and he wants to be the one to get her there. He thinks he can manage it with his thumb on her clitoris, his two fingers inside her. She rolls her hips a little, adjusting to him, gasping hard.

“Is this okay?” he asks, still against her ear. They both hold hands well above her head. He wishes he could learn everything she’s ever wanted, and that they had at least a week of uninterrupted time to investigate. “I could do this with my tongue if you want.”

“With your-” she makes a sound that alarms him until he realizes her laughter has fused with a moan. He remembers that Sano had once said some women liked it when you described- in detail- what you planned to do to them. At the time, Heisuke thought that sounded rather pointless but now he thinks he understands it.

“Someday, yes. Definitely. But for now stay here.” It’s the second time she’s said this, and she punctuates the demand with a kiss that goes on and on. When Chizuru reaches climax, their lips are still sliding against each other, and her cries leak out around the edges.

Maybe drinking blood keeps him alive, but this is what makes him want to live.

He cradles her close, staying with her during the descent from her high. She mouths a thank you, circling her index finger over his lips.

“You’ve done this with someone before,” she says, when she can speak. It’s not a question, but not a judgment, either.

He hates lying to her, but it would be especially absurd to try in this case. During their first genuine conversation, she’d come across him trying to sneak to Shimabara with Shinpachi and Sano, and they’d all been clear about it being a habit.

“Yeah....” He had liked the women of the red light district. Beneath their ornate kimonos, jeweled hair combs, and flowing dance moves, there’d been something flinty and resilient about them. Bright as dyed silk, crystalline and hard. It rarely came to the surface, but sometimes he’d catch fleeting glimpses of their own strict code. He’d felt an abiding affection for that, as strong as his enjoyment of their bodies. It wasn’t an observation he’d ever have shared with Sano or Shinpachi, but he’d said something about it to Saito, and Saito had understood.

“Yeah,” he repeats, “but I don’t know what to say about that...”

“Shhhh.” Her fingers slip under the hem of the pants, then they make their way to the front. Again, she’s undoing his buttons. “It’s alright, I didn’t exactly expect you to be faithful to someone you’d never even met. And obviously you know what you’re doing. That’s good.” She smiles in a way he’s never seen from her before, but he has seen from other women he’s satisfied. It’s a little alarming, but it’s also like hearing the disparate parts of his life click together. Whole at last. “That’s really good.”

There’s a note of wistfulness in her voice, somehow simultaneously discordant and complementary to her contentment. Heisuke remembers that she’s old enough to be several years into a marriage by now. Married with all that entailed. Had there not been a war, had her father not been who he was... Well. Chizuru’s had her own share of lonely nights, and painfully long hours.

“You’re doing really good, too,” he says. “Really, really good.” He’s overflowing with superlatives, and somehow that leads into kissing. And for a while that’s all they do, even with her hands in his underwear, fingers spread across his hips. At some point, she starts stroking his flagging cock, bring it back to attention.

“Goodness,” she giggles a little. “These Western pants don’t seem like they’d be very forgiving of… Well.”

Heisuke pauses in the middle of pulling them off completely. “Trust me, it’s horrible. I’m glad I didn’t have to grow up with them.”

They’re both completely naked but that’s almost (almost) unremarkable. It’s as thought they’ve been naked for quite some time. Naked in all the ways that matter. He sinks back into Chizuru’s embrace. She bends her knees to just the right angle, and he’s drawn towards the correct spot. “Should I…?” he wishes there was a better way to ask this.

“Yes.” An unassuming word, but so profound.

He pushes forward; in and in until he must stop. He breathes; in and in until he must exhale. Small needs and simple movements, and Chizuru is his whole world.

When Heisuke next looks at her, he discovers how tight she is. Tight around him, fingernails scratching tight against his flesh, tight in all the muscles of her face.

“You doing okay? Does it hurt?” His voice is thin, a thread about to snap.

“… A little. It’s fading, but…”

She’s slick and hot, and with his each careful thrust, her hips arch up into his. But then her eyes narrow in frustration a second later.

“But…?” Something was definitely off. He slows completely, rubbing the side of her face with his thumb. He wants to call her a hundred different comforting endearments, but they all sound unbelievably stupid. He wants to keep moving, sliding into the warmth of her. But, more than anything else, he wants to stop being the cause of that pained look on her face.

He grabs one of her hands and holds it. “Talk to me.”

“I want to be able to move more,” she blurts out. Her voice cracks, scraped raw until only base elements shine out. “But if I move more I think you’ll get to move less… But I still want that. I’m sorry, is that terrible of me?”

It’s hard not to laugh. “Yeah, you’re the worst.”

“Heisuke!” She actually smacks him lightly on the ass, and then he really does laugh. Then she stares at her own hand and starts giggling, too.

“No, seriously, thank you for telling me. I think if we do it facing each other…”

He pulls out and she lies there, panting like she did the night she ran up the stairs in Ikeda Inn. Just as he’s about to ask her if she’s okay, she kneels across from him. Heisuke knows he looks silly, sitting in this casual position, erection completely exposed. But Chizuru runs her hands over his arms, and then crawls into his lap.

“Okay, I see how this will go.” First her legs cross around him, her thighs against his hips, her shins crossed behind him. Their positions mirrored. Her entrance is so close to his arousal, and he thinks about how it felt just moments ago.

_Damn, this is really happening. It’s already happened._

“Chizuru...”

“I know.” Bracing herself on her shoulders, she raises herself up, and Heisuke grips tight to her hips as she lowers onto him. “I know, I know.” It’s not a fast descent, but that’s alright. She first looks up to the ceiling, and her throat works as she lets him fill her. When she’s finished, there’s a moment where it’s all a confusing jumble of limbs, the sweat rolling down his arms, the emptiness echoing in his skull, all of his remaining blood rushing south. Then he pieces together everything else; how her breasts press against his chest, how they can both hug each other. How ‘together’ can be isolated and boiled down to the purest of feelings.

“Hey, you,” she says quietly. She giggles, shy and proud all at once.

“Hey yourself.” His lungs and eyes are burning, light cracking out through his chest, awe and love all sewn up together.

Chizuru rocks up and down. He watches her wince as she hits an angle she dislikes. Then he feels the way her hips snap harder and harder still when she hits an angle she does like. She fucks herself on him and it’s earthy and lustful. There’s also something poetic about her face looks as she learns more about herself, more about him, and more about how to drag them both to the same distant place.

“You feel so _good_ ,” she moans. “How do you always make me feel so good?”

He’s known for years that her shoulders fit perfectly into his palms, but he’s learning that her hips do as well. When he reaches for her breasts, they seem made for him too. Maybe every part of him belongs to every part of her.

“I should be saying that.”

“It can be true-” she gasps- “for both of us.”

Heisuke can’t move too much, but thinks he won’t hold out for much longer. He mentally recites all the parts of his sword, then starts running through every type of weapon he knows. When he moves on to listing schools of fighting techniques, Chizuru starts cracking up, and has to stop moving for a few moments. He realizes he’s been saying that part aloud.

“I would get jealous but those don’t sound like names.”

“…Did you want to hear your name?” Here's another thing Sano said women liked. Another thing that kind of confused him until now.

“If you want,” she says, sounding bemused more than anything else. But as he whispers it across her lips and ear, she moves again. Harder, and harder still. Each motion of her body leaves no room for self-consciousness. Even his laughter doesn’t sound like laughter, and neither does hers. She’s clamping down on him, and her legs begin to give way. She loses her bearings, and he catches her when she briefly collapses against his chest.

“Hah, you got me.”

“’Course. Don’t know how long I can hold out, though.” It’s hardly the worst thing he’s confessed to her.

“Then let it happen.” She seems to draw on her last reserves, embracing him deeply, kissing and licking the skin near her ear. “Please, please, please. I want you to, Heisuke.”

“But I also want…” His words are evaporating. Instead he clutches onto her, lending her his strength. He can’t see her face, but he can hear her cries. His vision is blurry, and they are a chaotic mess of skin, and dampness, and moans. Later, he won’t be able to say who climaxed first, only that they both did in the end.

And then they are on the floor, surrounded by the detritus of their clothing and emotions. He curls up over her. They’re both unbelievably warm right, but he wants to shield her from the cold that will come eventually. One of her hands is on his chest, the other has twisted around under his arm, and he doesn’t quite realize they’ve been kissing until they stop. His eyelashes feel wet and heavy, like he’s trying to blink in a thick fog.

“Was that... satisfactory?” he asks, taking on a hesitant tone with her that he’s sure he used when he told her to call him by his first name. Words matter now, and again he finds himself coming up short.

She nuzzles her forehead into his cheek. “So formal. Do you want to the full debriefing, captain?”

“Report at once, soldier.” He nudges her so that she’s looking at him again.

“It was all I could have wanted. You mean so much to me,” she murmurs, her thumb sliding down the bridge of his nose, and over his mouth. She pulls his lower lip down a little before her hands drops, she yawns and then nods off with impressive alacrity. Heisuke reflects on how sleeping next to someone makes you almost as vulnerable as sex. She’s beneath him, naked, his swords within reaching distance, and she’s bled because of him before. Even before he became a fury, there would have been many reasons to fear and resent him.

He decides to go in search of a blanket after all. As he creeps throughout this empty house, he notices that many clothes are missing, and there’s no money to be found. This house has been good to him, and he chooses to believe that these things hint that its owners escaped town with their lives. When he finds their neatly folded and clean bedding, he grabs some of it, returns to Chizuru. Heisuke likes to cling onto cushions as he sleeps, and he holds her in a similar way. Time seems to slip into an abyss, before his consciousness prowls back in. The windows obscure things, but he can tell the sky is as dark as ink, as dark as Hijikata’s hair, and in less than an hour they will have to be on the run again. He kisses the back of Chizuru’s neck, until she wakes.

“I’m sorry, Chizuru, but we can’t stay for much longer.”

“Don’t worry.” She rubs the ball of her foot against his shin. “I feel alert. I didn’t really want to stay asleep.”

“Bad dreams?”

“I dreamed about Sen. I think because… Because I was so happy last night, and I got to choose what I did. She doesn’t get to have either of those things right now.”

Happiness and choice. Chizuru names these things as if they are a luxury, and it says a lot about their world that they seem that way.

“It’s always sounded like she’s a great friend.”

“She is.”

“Tell me about her. How did you meet, anyway?”

Chizuru talks, and he listens, comforting her with his touches whenever words might fail. She asks him about Sannan, and he has to be honest, again; he’d spent years admiring and envying Sannan’s perfectly composed demeanor. Kondou had had that boundless charisma, and Hijikata is a natural leader. But there had been many years where Sannan had been Heisuke’s ideal model for a warrior. Maybe he should have said something about it after he broke his arm, and before he took the ochimizu.

No matter what, he needs to see this mission through.

“Today will be hard.”

“Yes.”

They don’t speak much about the previous night, though they do express amusement at how far some of their clothing traveled. Then they retrieve everything, tying up sashes, buttoning up buttons, armoring themselves for what’s to come. Heisuke starts to tie his hair back, before he remembers what’s happened to it. So he helps Chizuru with hers, instead.

One last hug, and then he opens the door. There are no stars, but the sun is low enough that it doesn’t hurt him yet. There’s a pale echo of the moon in the sky, transparent, like a disc of smoky glass. He knows he might die today, but at least he’s had a chance to see a morning sky with Chizuru.

**Author's Note:**

> I've always really loved this pairing. These two just really, really enjoy each other's company. They are so into everything about each other, and they end up being so emotionally healthy. When they manage to make it work, I get so happy. In the middle of working on this I ended up watching the Heisuke musical which shot my love for this pairing through the roof. (It also made me feel weirdly wistful about the Heisuke and Sannan relationship, so that ended up in here too)
> 
> And basically I had a lot of enthusiasm that made a birthday fic I expected to be in the 1,000-2,000 range end up being 5,000+. But I don't regret it either.


End file.
